Extraordinary Opportunity: Hands-On Audio-Transfer Workshop

From Information Studies Assistant Professor Shawn VanCour:

I’m pleased to announce an opportunity for students to participate in an audio transfer workshop that will be held in conjunction with my IS 484/289-5: Sound Technologies & Society course from 1:30pm to 5pm on Wednesday, 11/14. The event will be hosted by the Music Library and held in the library’s classroom space on the first floor of the Schoenberg Music Building. This an official class session for my course, but I am opening extra seats to other students who may wish to attend, with first priority given to IS Lab staff, followed by members of our campus ARSC and AMIA chapters, then any other members of our IS community, TFT School, and Ethnomusicology Department. Interested parties should contact me directly at svancour@ucla.edu to claim a seat.

To start the session, we’ll videochat with Will Chase, Project Lead for NPR’s Research, Archives & Digital Strategy team, who oversees the organization’s digital preservation projects and is author of the standard text on preservation reformatting in the Association for Recorded Sound Collection’s Guide to Audio Preservation. Mr. Chase will expand on some of the principles laid out in that text and discuss how his NPR team applies them in their day-to-day preservation work. You can read more about him and the RAD project here.

The second part of the workshop will be led by Capitol Studios recording engineer Christina Paakkari, who is a prominent member of the Audio Engineering Society and has worked with a star-studded roster of musical talent covering nearly every genre imaginable. She will guide us through basic transfer techniques in an initial demonstration session, followed by a hands-on practice session where people can try out some short transfers on their own. For further information on Ms. Paakkari’s work, you can view her AES profile page here and recording credits here.

If students would like to prepare for the session, I would recommend looking at Will Chase’s chapter in the ARSC Guide (Chapter 6), as well as the more detailed guidelines in the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archive’s Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects. For more background on some of the metadata standards and digital asset management strategies that will be discussed, consult the corresponding chapters in the ARSC Guide by Marsha McGuire (Chapter 5) and Chris Lacinak (Chapter 7).